Practice Areas & Industries: Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP

Practice/Industry Group Overview

Companies with large volumes of litigation across the United States face many challenges, including: litigating cases locally but managing them centrally to ensure a consistent approach, tracking trends and minimizing risk of future litigation of the same nature; producing and gathering large volumes of documents for discovery; indexing and storing documents related to repetitive litigation for easy retrieval; and controlling and reducing the cost of litigation, including costs of payments, legal and expert fees and runaway jury verdicts.

Services Available

Bringing to bear broad and deep litigation experience, a national presence and extensive resources, Hinshaw has served as National or Regional Litigation Counsel for several industry-leading companies. In this role, we:

• Assist with insurance coverage issues, including coordination of notice to the proper insurance carrier, and support the third party claims administrator on the claims administration aspects of the case.
• Communicate with in-house lawyers on major issues, such as: key depositions; hiring experts; settlement discussions; any impact of the trial on the reputation of a product, the company or the like; and the status of legal fees and other costs associated with the litigated case.
• Develop and direct a uniform and consistent approach for managing litigation, assuring coordinated positions in pleadings, discovery responses, depositions and document production, among other things.
• Direct the selection and utilization of expert witnesses. As with the firm’s network of local counsel, we have a well-developed network of expert witnesses and maintain a database of information about these individuals.
• Estimate exposure early in the process and deliver a preliminary assessment.
• Manage local counsel; educate them about the clients' business, culture, products and organization; and ensure that they approach cases in a manner consistent with the nationally (or regionally) directed approach. When appropriate or desired by the client, we review local counsel invoices and manage payment of their fees.
• Personally handle cases or assign local counsel from our well-developed network of qualified and experienced local counsel and/or from a pre-selected list compiled by our client and its in-house counsel.
• Track trends, recommend appropriate preventive measures. We also frequently oversee clients' risk management programs, and design and provide risk management training.

Through our effective management of National or Regional Counsel programs, we typically deliver clients highly coordinated and responsive litigation and trial counsel more efficiently than was incurred prior to the establishment of the program. These services help lift the burden on our clients and their in-house legal departments of hiring, managing and instructing multiple local counsel located across the county. Clients which take advantage of our National or Regional Counsel programs often find that their in-house counsel in charge of litigation can turn their focus to the important task of managing strategic or major cases.